The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

Book #104 of 2025:

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

This is the latest “Secret Project,” a name that author Brandon Sanderson gives to the books he’s written in his spare time outside his regular public writing schedule and produced via crowdfunding instead of traditional publishing. Although technically a standalone piece, it is set within his sprawling cosmere saga, which means the standard preliminaries apply: you don’t necessarily need to have read any or all of the previous releases in that massive setting, but there are common histories and worldbuilding principles that the text assumes you’re probably familiar with. The immediate plot is focused enough that a total newcomer could still follow along, but the bewildering array of characters, factions, species, and types of ‘investiture’ magic can be overwhelming even for those of us who have done all the relevant homework.

This novel is interesting for being an expansion of the writer’s 2014 novella Sixth of the Dusk (previously collected in the anthology Arcanum Unbounded). That is, it’s a sequel that incorporates the earlier story — with minor edits for tone — as a sequence of flashback chapters, which is an approach I don’t think I’ve seen before. In that initial excursion, the protagonist is a native tracker in a Polynesian-inspired culture who navigates a deadly island while reflecting on the more technologically-advanced outsiders who have recently come to his planet. In this fuller version, it’s clearer that the new arrivals are Scadrian — using powers endemic to the Mistborn books — and the entry takes place in some future era, when that civilization is a militaristic space empire. Here an older Sixth ventures into the Cognitive Realm, in search of allies or other means to resist the impending colonialist forces.

I like this tale when it focuses on either our hero or his co-lead, the young dragon Starling. She doesn’t have as well-defined a motivating arc to begin with, but once their paths cross about midway through the book, she’s fun to watch trying to find a way out of their particular predicament. I also appreciate how a central theme of the work concerns the importance of oral knowledge and other traditional folkways, both for their own sake and as a method for resisting imperialism.

I am less sold on the many crossover elements, and the increasing feeling throughout the franchise that tracking them has been left as an exercise for the hyper-attentive reader. Major canon revelations are nice, and subtle Easter egg connections back and forth can be a delight, but I shouldn’t have to look up the right wiki or subreddit or explainer video to be sure I’m catching everything. The balance is off here in my personal opinion, which is a deepening complaint I’ve had about the cosmere for a while now. The present adventure remembers to tighten its scope at times to let the main characters shine, but their supporting cast is thin and the larger impacts regularly feel like they’re getting in the way of the plot at hand. Sanderson at his best can deliver such lore in service to the struggles of specific personalities, but when those two impulses are in conflict, I will always favor fiction that prioritizes the people over the grander continuity details.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green

Book #103 of 2025:

Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green (Nightside #3)

Not great, but I like it better than I did on my last read in 2019. I’ve described the Nightside books before as having rhythms similar to a police procedural TV show, and after a pilot outing and a fairly thrilling followup, this third volume represents our first real filler episode. It’s still fun, to be clear! Author Simon R. Green continues to spin some really imaginative setpieces and character concepts for this urban fantasy setting, and I appreciate that Shotgun Suzie and Razor Eddie are both mentioned but absent, given their prominent roles in the two previous adventures. In their place, we’re introduced to a few new faces who will go on to become recurring presences too, most notably the unkillable zombie teenager Dead Boy.

The problem is, there’s not much powering the plot this time around. The series debut carried the inherent energy of introducing everything, and the second novel offered cataclysmic stakes with the forces of heaven and hell ripping apart the city in the hero’s wake. In this next story, it’s just that same noir-ish detective taking on a more mundane case, investigating a singer whose soulful performances are driving audience members to suicide. That sort of reset might have been necessary — we can’t have the apocalypse every installment, even in the Nightside — but it’s a pivot that ideally should have come with some personal angle for the protagonist to spark our investment. Here, he’s merely a bloke on a job.

The larger mystery arcs involving his unknown enemies and vague portentous rumblings about his vanished inhuman mother are featured again, but not meaningfully advanced. You could skip over this title and never notice it, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. There simply are no major developments in its pages, enjoyable as it remains to see John Taylor overcoming a sequence of escalating magical threats with bluffs off his reputation and a pocketful of black pepper as much as his own special talent.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, and repeated use of a transphobic slur. In general, this series is embracing of genderfluid pronouns and what it calls cross-dressing — though you could certainly accuse it of exoticizing queer identities and equating them with the rest of the macabre pulp weirdness — but it was written in Britain in the early 2000s, and that obviously shades how such matters are presented.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Book #102 of 2025:

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow is a consummate biographer, probably best known for popularizing the tale of an overlooked Founding Father into an account that became the basis for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Here he turns his attentions a century forward to the life of author Mark Twain, who represents a considerably less obscure subject matter. We likely all have an image of the man in our heads, have read or at least discussed his controversial bestseller Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and are acquainted with the basic facts of his existence: born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, grew up in the sort of small frontier town he’d later set his fiction in, piloted a riverboat for a while, and eventually turned to writing and public speaking, for which he crafted a wealth of humorous aphorisms that are still widely quoted today. (A personal favorite: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”)

This new biography expands upon those facets at great length — it’s yet another Chernow text clocking in at over 1000 pages — with plenty of direct excerpts from Twain’s own journals and private letters. It goes further, however, to round out its portrait beyond the avuncular mustachioed figure in that canonical white suit. Outside of his books themselves, we learn of the writer’s failed business ventures, and how he was constantly falling for some fast talker’s harebrained get-rich-quick scheme. We hear a lot about his progressive politics, which included a lifelong friendship with Frederick Douglass and an unpopular aversion to American imperialism in the Philippines. And we get a sense of the wilder culture around him, which he navigated as one of the country’s first real celebrities.

We also see how dependent he was on his wife Livy, who served as his editor and household manager, and how rudderless he was after her passing, elevating his secretary to a romance-free but otherwise similar role whilst ignoring how his adult daughters chafed against her even as she had the younger one needlessly confined to a sanitarium. (To the extent the employer-employee relationship was effectively a marriage, the two subsequently had a huge and legally protracted divorce that played out in the popular press.) He ultimately outlived three of his four children, including a son who died as a toddler.

Above all, Mark Twain was a complicated man, which Chernow captures ably. Although generally a liberal thinker, he had his share of hangups and misconceptions, like an appreciation for Jews that seemed based on many of the same stereotypes that drove antisemitism in others. He could be racist in one moment and an avowed egalitarian in the next. Most awkwardly, he spent much of his final decades obsessing over the company of young girls aged ten to sixteen, whom he recruited into a private fan club for himself — though always with a chaperone and apparently never a hint of impropriety. The biographer largely avoids either lionizing or judging Clemens throughout, and he speculates here that the children may have represented the widower’s attempt to recapture his bygone happy family days. That two of his daughters were still alive at this point and frustrated over these newcomers taking all their father’s attention is but another irony in a lifetime full of them.

Could the work have been tightened up in places? Sure. This is an exhaustive and frequently exhausting narrative, pulling out minutiae that other biographies — including the subject’s own infamously rambling memoir — perhaps would have skipped right past. But one doesn’t read Chernow for the digestible takeaways, despite how I’ve tried to summarize them here. We read an author like this to immerse ourselves utterly in the lives of others, and Sam Clemens offers a wonderful specimen for that type of lens.

[Content warning for slavery and racial slurs.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 19

TV #34 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 19

I’m maybe overly charitable towards Peter Davison’s first season as the Fifth Doctor, but there were inevitably going to be growing pains after seven years of his predecessor Tom Baker. And to be clear, I am still not saying that this is great television, as a whole. The acting and writing for the new lead take some time to settle in, and his costars have an even rougher go of it. There’s decent potential to this era, which the later Big Finish audios have really brought out, but in practice here, Nyssa stands around a lot and Tegan and Adric repeatedly squabble over nothing grounded. We should feel pathos about the boy’s departure in EARTHSHOCK — largely the reason I rank it as the best of this run, although the long-delayed return of the Cybermen is fun too — but as with so many other promising elements, it’s somewhat muddled in the execution.

At least Fivey is an interesting protagonist: considerably more passive and helpless than the brash Fourth Doctor, which is only exacerbated when his sonic screwdriver is destroyed in THE VISITATION (a development that surprisingly sticks around until the Eighth Doctor movie a decade and a half further on). If Baker was an arrogant genius who could wave a powerful device to get past any narrative barrier, his replacement is forced to hem and haw and rely on the characters around him more and more. Three companions proves to be a bit too much for the scripts to handle, but I likewise have to give some credit for the attempt at something new — okay, old again, technically — from the aging show.

But it’s hard to know what to do when the Master randomly puts on a transparently racist disguise and no one bothers to mention it, or when the world’s most boring murder mystery unfolds with only one suspect, whose motive appears to be that he’s an ableist caricature himself. I can’t defend such matters, and I mostly tolerate this moment in Doctor Who rather than truly enjoying it. We’re on the slow slide towards cancellation at this point, and while I promise it’s not all downhill, I can’t honestly claim that any of these particular stories would constitute a must-watch.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
TIME-FLIGHT (19×23 – 19×26)

★★★☆☆
CASTROVALVA (19×1 – 19×4)
BLACK ORCHID (19×17 – 19×18)
FOUR TO DOOMSDAY (19×5 – 19×8)
THE VISITATION (19×13 – 19×16)

★★★★☆
KINDA (19×9 – 19×12)
EARTHSHOCK (19×19 – 19×22)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

TV Review: Reservation Dogs, season 3

TV #33 of 2025:

Reservation Dogs, season 3

I rated the first two seasons of this show as 4-out-of-5 stars apiece, and I’m tempted to lower my rating of this last one to a 3. Structurally, it’s kind of a mess, without nearly enough scenes of the kids all hanging out together as friends. Instead, they’re repeatedly siloed off into their own separate adventures — two full episodes this year (out of just ten total) featuring only Bear, for instance, and another that’s entirely a flashback to a previous decade absent any of the regular actors. Even in the remaining installments where everyone does appear, it’s often simply for a quick check-in moment at the start or end.

And yet! For all the looseness of the plot and the missing sense of group camaraderie, those individual stories generally remain enjoyable slices of Oklahoma indigenous life and community, centered around protagonists we know pretty well at this point. It’s not my ideal way to use these characters, especially for their farewell time with us, but I can’t fault the writing too severely when it’s as well-observed and funny as ever. I’m assuming the wonkiness is at least partially due to limited cast availability too, with the scripts making the best of that unfortunate constraint. The result may be the weakest iteration of Reservation Dogs yet, but it’s still better than a lot of shows out there, all the way through to its unsurprisingly heartfelt end.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

Book Review: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

Book #101 of 2025:

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1)

This is currently my very favorite book, which I’ve now read three times in as many years. (I’m not necessarily committing to maintaining an annual reread, but I’m not ruling it out, either.) Like Kip scribbling additions to his undelivered letter every time it came back to him after the Fall, what follows is an updated version of my original review:

The Hands of the Emperor is a wonderful warm hug of a novel, rich in characterization and gentle affirmation of community trust. It’s rare for a 900-page fantasy tome to feel so cozy, let alone to forgo any significant romance or acts of violence throughout its duration. But this self-published 2019 work is remarkable in any number of ways, each more endearingly quaint than the last. I am honestly not even sure that I would say it has a plot, although events do gradually unfold in support of the central character arc: a quietly effective middle-aged civil servant belatedly earning (or realizing he already has) the love and admiration of his colleagues, his far-off relatives, and his boss.

It’s an incredibly slow unveiling. Cliopher Mdang, private secretary to the ruler of the entire world, spends the first quarter of the text escorting his liege on an incognito holiday, the result of a breach-of-protocol invitation blurted out upon a stroke of insight about how lonely the other man must be in his peerless existence under elaborate courtly taboos, unable to be touched or looked directly in the eye. The two have known each other for decades — or possibly even millennia, as time has fractured in the cataclysmic backstory and now passes slower in some parts of the land than others — but their relationship has previously only ever been professional. We essentially get to meet His Radiancy the individual as Kip does, whilst simultaneously gaining a feel for the viewpoint protagonist himself and the dazzlingly intricate worldbuilding details that author Victoria Goddard has devised for the various cultures of the setting.

The tone here is something like The Goblin Emperor crossed with The West Wing. Or the musical Hamilton, if it weren’t a tragedy and showed its titular politician as more in touch with his island origins like Disney’s Moana. (Immigrants! They get the job done!) It turns out that in his rise through the levels of government, our hero has been subtly reworking that system, pushing for law and policy changes that will contribute to a more equitable society. Inspired by his distant egalitarian homeland, he’s rooted out corruption, instituted a universal basic income, improved the postal and transportation services, and implemented countless further such ideas that in an aggregation of incremental steps have functionally revolutionized the realm. It’s a rejection of grimdark cynicism, a hopepunk ode to the fundamental principle of good governance’s ability to help people, and it’s absolutely riveting to see in action, especially once its unassuming architect starts getting openly acknowledged and rewarded for it.

This is also a story about cultural conflicts: about coming from a small backwater province to the capital of the known universe and facing misunderstanding and scorn for the customs of home. About keeping those folkways kindled inside as a guiding beacon, and ultimately proving that oral traditions are not primitive but lavish and meaningful and preserved over generations as a powerful representation of identity. About finding a way to make Kip’s family understand why he left and everything he’s accomplished in the wider civilization, and about his personal journey to realize how he needs to be a better advocate for himself in their eyes.

Above all, I would say that this is a book about being seen and accepted and loved for who you are. The evolving dynamic between Cliopher and the Last Emperor is not romantic — and I’ve heard that in the sequel, the diligent bureaucrat is more explicitly characterized as asexual — but it is deeply intimate and a model of trusting fealty as the lord and his loyal aide come to reveal more and more of themselves to one another. The meaning of the title is twofold: Kip both serves as the metaphorical hands of the Emperor in interpreting and enacting his will across the kingdom and yearns to be able to grasp His Radiancy’s actual hands in friendship. The catharsis of when he finally does, along with several other key moments in the long path there, is emotional and soothing and genuinely heartfelt. Adults being competent at their jobs and earnestly decent to the fellow souls in their lives! Is that what people mean when they describe genre fiction as wish-fulfillment?

There is some periodic darkness, on the margins. Abusive marriages are mentioned, the trauma of the Fall that most characters lived through continues to affect them, and the protagonist feels intense isolation and survivor’s guilt that has to be carefully unpacked and confronted, with the occasional panic attack along the way. The possibility of suicide is raised obliquely in passing, and we learn that his former superiors used to torture their political enemies, in the old days before his reforms. One minor character comes from a tribe that practices sacred ritualistic cannibalism, while another gets casually deadnamed at first mention, although there’s no indication of any transphobia that would give that act the same violent impact it carries in our world. (“Clia was [__] originally, but she changed her name when she was of age to declare herself a woman.”) I raise these issues to respect reader sensitivities, but in general, I’d say that they only cause the pervasive spirit of humanitarian acceptance that powers the novel to stand out more clearly.

This was my initial introduction to both Goddard as a writer and her broader Nine Worlds saga, and having subsequently now read 29 further titles in that continuity — everything but The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul, and At the Feet of the Sun, which take place following this one — I still think it’s probably the best entry point for newcomers. The rest have generally been great as well, though, and they’ve definitely added delightful background context for me on my rereads. (The novella The Tower at the Edge of the World, detailing a certain character’s backstory, is particularly fascinating — I wouldn’t suggest picking it up first, but revisiting this one afterwards provides some excellent dramatic irony.) Like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nine Worlds series is less of a single unfolding narrative and more of a loose configuration of smaller contained stories that’s forgiving of practically any reading order but builds in enjoyment the deeper you go and the more connections you start to spot. Nevertheless, my personal recommendation remains for folks to begin right here, with a thoughtful islander striking up an unprecedented conversation with his weary sovereign.

★★★★★

Book Review: No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris

Book #100 of 2025:

No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris

An absolutely infuriating read detailing a half-century of increasing malfeasance at the vaunted pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. Author Gardiner Harris is an investigative journalist who’s spent years digging into these cases, but the most incredible part of the resulting exposé is how little of it represents truly breaking news. Much of this information has already been reported elsewhere; it just has somehow done minimal damage to the company’s sterling reputation.

(In fact, the one area where I’m a tad disappointed by the book is in the lack of a solid explanation for that persistent amnesia. The writer observes how J&J is still associated with nostalgic americana from its baby powder era, how the firm won widespread good will with its response to a case of Tylenol poisonings in the 1980s — voluntarily recalling millions of units and introducing new tamper-proof measures, while downplaying its own complicity in the attack — and how its influence has been known to quash or redirect negative coverage. But none of this quite accounts for the public’s seeming ability to shrug off repeated stories and lawsuits implicating the corporation.)

Seeing it all laid out here, with supporting evidence of internal memos from whistleblowers and discovery documents, is so devastating I hardly know how to summarize the matter. Over and over again, executives knew that particular drugs were harmful in the way they were being prescribed off-label, and yet continued to push those usages. Treatments that weren’t approved for children or the elderly were marketed to pediatricians and assisted living facilities, alongside lavish gifts from sales reps who were in turn openly encouraged to flout the law in their pitches. FDA directives were outright ignored when possible, or otherwise slow-walked in compliance to squeeze out more profits regardless of any identified danger. Johnson & Johnson also lobbied successfully to weaken that same federal watchdog, while using its existence to deflect in court that surely any problems would have been caught by its supposed protections.

Harris makes an early comparison to the notorious tobacco companies who misled customers about their own products for decades, and as it turns out, that’s not hyperbolic at all. The drug manufacturer likewise cultivated paid experts who could twist statistics to produce desired findings on demand and buried all the contrary studies that indicated harm. Most damningly, the conglomerate seems to have accepted death and other serious side effects for a percentage of consumers as the simple cost of doing business, recognizing that any government fine or legal settlement for wrongdoing would be vastly overshadowed by the ensuing fortune to be gained.

Individual bad actors get named, but to a certain extent, it’s really an indictment of the entire industry, if not unrestrained capitalism as a whole. There’s no easy solution to the predicament outlined here beyond asking readers to be more skeptical of what their doctors prescribe, which could obviously usher in its own set of unfortunate consequences. We want to be able to trust our physicians and believe they’ve been given reliable information on the options available for us and our loved ones — but when corporate greed takes over and infects that ecosystem, we all suffer from an ineffective regulatory state. As these pages make clear, the rot in the company culture at Johnson & Johnson has reached a critical mass that needs some sort of intervention at this point if it’s ever going to be cured.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Babylon 5, season 5

TV #32 of 2025:

Babylon 5, season 5

The last season of this 90s sci-fi show is somehow even weaker than the previous one, although there are enough saving elements here and there that I’ll still give it a three-star rating overall. (And it is better than some of the movies, at least.) The problem is partly to do with behind-the-scenes production concerns: Babylon 5 was initially conceived as a five-year story, but when it looked like it was going to be canceled prematurely, the writers moved up their timeline and tried to hit all the plot points they wanted in a rushed season 4. Then when the series got renewed after all, they of course had to come up with a new angle of approach for this final run.

That’s an unfortunate constraint, and maybe the result is the best we could have hoped for in those circumstances. But it’s not especially satisfying to watch the nascent Interstellar Alliance struggle against poorly-developed intrigues or to see the bland telepath Byron temporarily become the series lead. I also really miss Susan Ivanova, whose actress left over a contract dispute that the scripts don’t bother to rationalize (and who is rather transparently replaced with a knockoff version of the stern brunette). At least she comes back for the finale, since that was filmed as the original intended end for season 4 before the unexpected renewal.

Individual moments save this from a complete disaster. That last episode, set 20 years ahead, is a fitting farewell to the setting and the characters, and 5×13 “The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father” intriguingly turns the recurring antagonist Bester into a genuine hero for the hour, which is the sort of structural experimentation I tend to enjoy. Meanwhile, Garibaldi’s resurgent alcoholism offers a stronger character arc for him than the brainwashing stuff it’s meant to be in response to.

But I’ve never quite managed to love this program despite watching over a hundred episodes of it now, and this concluding iteration is particularly hard to endorse. We’ll have to see if the last few films or the spinoff show Crusade do anything more for me.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 1 > 4 > 5

Movie Review: Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers (2002)

Movie #8 of 2025:

Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers (2002)

This TV movie aired four years after the end of Babylon 5, but I’ve chosen to watch it where it apparently falls in the continuity, sometime between the earlier film The River of Souls and the regular series finale. In truth, it could be watched almost anywhere, however, as it’s pretty tenuously connected to the original show. G’kar is here, but he’s literally the only returning character, and while Andreas Katsulas is fun and familiar in that role, it’s not meaningfully informed by what we’ve seen of his arc or where it ended before.

Granted, there are still Minbari and some other species we know, alongside references to the Alliance and their old enemies the Shadows, and of course the Rangers themselves were a long-running component of the television program. But this doesn’t feel much like Babylon 5, which at its heart was always about the community on that titular station and how it transformed through various emerging political crises. This is more of a standard sci-fi action piece — which isn’t inherently a bad thing, as Star Trek has repeatedly proven how a franchise can successfully launch spinoffs that differ dramatically from their roots. But the key is that the new story and characters must be interesting in their own right, and that’s where this one fails completely.

Who are these heroes? Well, the main one is Pacey’s square-jawed brother from Dawson’s Creek, and they all have a scene where they introduce themselves and their specialties on the ship he’s captaining, but they’re a fairly generic bunch overall. The plot finds them targeted by a shadowy enemy, which they defeat by first shooting at it in a really determined way and then blowing it up.

If this title had gotten higher ratings, it was intended to lead into a full sequel series, which presumably would have developed the cast and the premise a bit further. But most pilots do a better job than this at setting up their little world! This one coasts on the genre and the concepts it’s inherited, and while I don’t know if I can honestly say it’s worse than the goofy overacting in River of Souls, it’s certainly a lot less entertaining.

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998)

Movie #7 of 2025:

Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998)

I’ve been watching my way through the last season of Babylon 5, and the viewing guide that I’m following situates this film (and the later one The Legend of the Rangers) just before the finale. Plotwise, that checks out, as the events here do seem to take place sometime after the penultimate episode. Of course, as a result of the departures there, we’re left with a depleted cast of characters from the main ensemble: only Captain Lochley and Zach Allen still onboard the station, joined by Michael Garibaldi returning for story reasons (with a fun lampshade-hanging observation that things sure are quiet now without him, right before he arrives and the chaos kicks off).

Although the setting is familiar, it feels a bit empty compared to the usual show, which is theoretically a gap that the guest stars could fill. And on paper, they’re excellent! We’ve got Martin Sheen and Ian McShane here, before their respective lead roles on The West Wing and Deadwood but obviously both already quite talented actors. In practice, however, they’re wasted on the material, with the former delivering platitudes from under a mountain of alien prosthetics and the latter reduced to maniacal gibbering for the most part. At least Tracy Scoggins is given more to do as Lochley than she typically was on the TV series, though you can practically feel her at times wanting to utter a George Lazenby-esque “This never happened to the other fellow.”

With that being said, while I initially rolled my eyes at the subplot of her trying to oust a “holo-brothel” that’s set up shop on Babylon 5, it develops into a sharp critique of technological abuses that seems eerily prescient in the face of AI deepfakes a quarter-century later. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a similar device that let users hook up with holographic recreations of real people without their knowledge or consent, but that always felt like a sleazy punchline to me, whereas this one is more aptly framed as a clear violation of its victims’ privacy and dignity.

Unfortunately, the primary plot angle is considerably more abstract. Remember those “soul hunters” from way back in the second episode of season one, who harvest the life essence of notable individuals (whatever that means) at the moment of death? They’re back! They apparently did their trick to an entire species at one point to save them from an impending genocide, but it turns out that those other beings were actually, whoops, on the cusp of ascending to a higher lifeform. I hate it when that happens. Luckily they really are preserved in a crystal ball thing that Sheen’s race has been hoarding, until McShane steals it and figures out how to open up a conduit.

None of this is great writing, and even at the story’s best, the intrusions from another dimension wreaking havoc on ours play out as a basic repeat of the earlier B5 movie Thirdspace. There’s maybe a common thematic thread with the brothel stuff on the importance of personal agency — of asking for somebody’s permission before either copying their likeness as your digital plaything or using your sci-fi witchcraft to decide they’re better off frozen in stasis rather than facing their apparent doom — but it’s a pretty weak effort overall.

Oh — and some hokey lawyer jokes, too. I guess the future’s not so different after all.

★★☆☆☆